The present invention relates to golf clubs of the wood or hybrid type where the club is formed as a hollow body including front, rear, top, bottom and side walls surrounding a hollow interior.
For clarity it is pointed out that a wood is a type of club which have longer shafts and larger, rounder heads than other club types, and are used to hit the ball longer distances than other types.
Woods are so called because, traditionally, they had a club head that was made from hardwood, generally persimmon, but modern clubs have heads made from metal, for example titanium, or composite materials, such as carbon fiber. The change to stronger materials has allowed the design of the modern woods to incorporate significantly larger heads than in the past. Woods are numbered in ascending order starting with the driver, or 1-wood, which has the lowest loft, usually between 9 and 13 degrees, and continuing with progressively higher lofts and numbers.
Woods generally fall into two classes, drivers and fairway woods, with a traditional set of clubs including a driver and one or two fairway woods (usually numbered 3 and 5.
A hybrid is a type of club used in the sport of golf with a design which differs from that of irons and woods. The name “hybrid” has been generalized, combining the familiar mechanics of an iron with the more forgiving nature and better distance of a wood. The long shaft of a fairway wood also requires lots of room to swing, making it unsuitable for tighter lies such as “punching” out from underneath trees. In addition, the fairway wood clubface is designed to skim over instead of cutting into turf, which makes it undesirable for shots from the rough. The answer to this dilemma for many players is to replace the 1-4 irons with hybrids
A hybrid generally features a head very similar to a fairway wood; hollow steel or titanium with a shallow, slightly convex face. A hybrid head is usually marginally shallower and does not extend backwards from the face as far as a comparable fairway wood; the head must have an iron-like lie angle and therefore has a flatter sole than a fairway wood.
In U.S. Pat. No. 6,623,375 (Davies) issued Sep. 23, 2003 is disclosed a golf club where the axis of the hosel passes through a line extending rearward from the center of the front face. That is the golf club iron has a club head having a generally planar generally rectangular front face for impacting a ball with a horizontal top edge and a horizontal bottom edge. The front face is symmetrical about an imaginary upright center line at right angles to a transverse line and equidistant between the sides so that the upright center line and the transverse center line intersect at an imaginary center point of the front face. The club head defines an imaginary horizontal center line at right angles to the transverse line passing through the imaginary center point of the front face and substantially through the center of gravity of the head. A tubular shaft hosel is integrally attached to the rear face of the club head with an axis of the tubular hosel at the club head coaxial with the axis of the shaft. The hosel is arranged so that the axis of the shaft and the hosel intersects the imaginary horizontal center line at a position reward of the center of gravity. This has been shown to reduce golf club twist at impact.
Similar arrangements are shown in the following:
USP 2011/0014992 (Morrissey) published Jan. 20, 2011;
PCT WO 98/29051 (Dalton) published Jul. 2, 1998;
GB 2 303 796 (Paxton) published May 3, 1997;
Another area where improvement in the operation of golf clubs can be made is in the structure and stability of the golf club head.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,313,607 (THOMPSON) issued Feb. 2, 1982 shows a reinforcing pin extending between the front face and the back wall to reinforce the front face.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,180,166 (Schmidt) issued Jan. 19, 1993 shows what they call a “dentritic” (this is apparently a word meaning tree like) structure which has a series of walls extending rearwardly from the front face.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,941,782 (Cook) issued Aug. 24, 1999 shows a pair of low walls extending rearwardly from the front face.